Taiwan: Microelectronics expertise widens

Most of NTU graduates are not so reluctant to become the future movers
and shakers in the microelectronics industry. From its geographically
separated campuses and research centers around the country -- comprising
one percent of the total land area of island of Taiwan -- NTU has
graduated an inordinate proportion of microelectronics leaders.

NTU has ranked number one for the last five years in the total research
papers from a single institution at DAC and IC-CAD, edging out the other
power-house research centers in EDA including IBM, UCLA and the
University of Michigan. However, NTU has also be quietly expanding its
reach into related microelectronics and software arenas, demonstrated
perhaps most forcefully by its domination in the annual ACM Knowledge
Discovery and Data mining (KDD) contest, which it has won in four of the
last five years.

"We won the first year we entered in 2008, but in 2009 we were not very
organized, so only won third place," said professor Shou-de Lin in the
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. "So in 2010
we started offering a course called 'Machine Learning and Data Mining:
Theory and Practice' whose objective is to win the KDD Cup."

Since then NTU has won the competition every year against hundreds of
other team efforts in both universities and industry worldwide. The
course, which students can only take once, teaches them both traditional
data mining-techniques, such as support vector machine (SVM) learning
as well as more novel techniques using neural networks and genetic
algorithms. This year Microsoft Academic Search is the KDD Cup sponsor,
and NTU is hopeful that it can win again, using over 300 different
algorithms running in parallel to come up with what it hopes will be the
best solution to the problem of achieving accurate real-time results
when searching more than 50 million publications with over 19 million
authors.

Besides EDA and KDD, NTU is also making major research efforts in
human-computer interaction (HCI), medical electronics and the resolution
of pressing social issues with novel semiconductors -- such as using
silicon nanoparticles to eliminate the need for the environmental damage
caused by mining rare-earth minerals.

Wow! this one of the interesting thing coming from Taiwan as I know such a long ago Taiwan not just a manufacturer but a design expert to. But what I to know here is how is Taiwan fared against USA in the microelectronics field eg: semiconductors, sensor to industry aspect, is Taiwan on par with USA or still not yet.
Is hard to find an article comparing a situation between Taiwan and USA in microelectronic related matter. Thanks.